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Another World IS still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose - and now it's collapsing around us. So how do we co-create a Thrutopian future that we'd all be proud to leave as our legacy?
What stories can we weave of possibility? Of transformation? What happens if we commit to a world based on generative values: compassion, courage, integrity?
What happens if we let go of the race for meaningless money and commit instead to the things that really matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil - and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves, between ourselves and each other, between ourselves and the Web of Life - so that we can reclaim our birthright as self-conscious nodes in the web of life?
We can do this. Some of us already are. Every week on Accidental Gods we speak with the people who are living this world into being, courageous pathfinders who are exploring the emergent edge of inter-becoming.
As a species, we have all the answers, we just haven't yet crafted all the new stories and woven them into a future that works. We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
Accidental Gods is a podcast and membership program devoted to exploring the ways we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations yet to come.
Find the membership and the podcast pages here: https://accidentalgods.life
Find Manda's Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk
Find Manda on BlueSky @mandascott.bsky.social
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/
On FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/MandaScottAuthor
Manda: Honouring everything feels like a new step. It's not huge, but it is significant. Those of us who have at the moment the privilege of having time to listen to a podcast, then what happens if we give all of ourselves in service to life? How much could that change the energy of the world around us? I have no idea the answer to this, but I think it's an experiment that would be very interesting for us to attempt.
Manda: Hey people. Welcome to Accidental Gods to the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible and that if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would all be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility, and this week it's a solo journey. It's the 11th of August, and there was a point when I was going to be away teaching, and then the teaching got cancelled, and I'm here and I just didn't get round to booking somebody else for the podcast. It's been quite busy on the farm, and as I'm sure you know, I am writing a new book, not only writing a new book, I have a new agent. I am dizzily happy, possibly more of that later, probably not in this podcast, but it means I have a deadline. I have to finish my book by the London Book Fair next year.
Manda: You will see less of me. Probably see less of me not on the podcast. I will continue doing the podcast. I am going to cancel everything else that it is humanly possible to cancel, because otherwise the book is not going to be done by the 16th of March. I was going to say, that's this month's news. But actually it happened within 20 minutes of the full moon on the 29th of July. So now we're in the middle of August, and it's three months since I last did a thought from the edge. And my goodness, hasn't a lot changed since then? We are in the middle of a summer where the world is burning, and while I am sure there are still people in your circles, as there are in mine who are deep in climate denialism, most people are not. And these are the ones that we can talk to. Liam Kavanagh told us that the overwhelming majority of people really want the world to be different. They really understand that the current system is not serving them and that there must be better systems. Back in May, I talked a lot about Thrutopian narratives, what they are, why we need them, how we craft them. I'm not going through that again. What I want to do today is take a deeper look at the metaphysics of where we're at.
Manda: I am constantly working with the concept of Joanna Macy's, Three Pillars of the Great Turning, and the three pillars were: Holding Actions, Systems Change and Shifting Consciousness. Holding Actions are the things that say 'This far and no further.'
Manda: They're the people who go and demonstrate against ICE in the States, or who lie in front of bulldozers in the UK to stop fracking happening, or any other millions upon millions of acts of personal courage that people take to try to stop the devastation from getting worse. And definitely we need to do this. As an aside, I am partway through reading The Day the World Stops Shopping by J.B. MacKinnon. And it does strike me that simply ceasing to consume anything we don't absolutely desperately need would bring capitalism to its knees quite fast. There are a number of obvious problems, starting with the fact that a lot of us would need to do it to have the impact that we need, and it's an absolutely terrible narrative. This is part of the reason we are where we are. We don't have the stories of a world that feels better, partly because the world we're moving into will of necessity mean consuming less. And at the moment, almost everybody's metric of how well their life is doing is measured in how much they can consume, if not actual stuff, then flights to hot places where they can spend money to lie in a beach or whatever is the money sink equivalent of anybody's choice. We live in a world where consumption is baked in and the capacity to consume, and up to a point to be seen to consume is our metric of how well we're doing.
Manda: Telling people they just need to voluntarily step off that train is really hard. And for the overwhelming majority of people, it's not likely to be listened to. Add to this the fact that apparently the supermarket bosses in the UK went to the government recently and said it's a question of when, not if, we have a food crisis. I learned that on MacroDose with James Meadway. If you're looking for podcasts to listen to, I totally recommend that. Anyway, 'when, not if' and they reckoned November. And if this is the case, then telling people they need to consume less at a point when the great bulk of their disposable income will be going into buying food is not a clever move. But the single most important reason why this is not something we really want to engage in, is that telling people to change their behaviour is demonstrably not effective. We need the behavioural change to emerge from inside. And given that the only person each of us can actually influence is ourselves, then that means we end up, I hope, putting the bulk of our energy into shifting our own consciousness. So that's where we want to head today.
Manda: So let's have a look at some of the baselines of things that I think are obvious and where we're at. And then I teach a Gathering and realise that perhaps they're not as obvious as I thought they were. The first and the most important is that we, each of us, are self-conscious, integral nodes in the Web of Life. And as an adjunct to that, if we lived in any functional indigenous culture, we would know this. Jon Young of the Art of Mentoring and Living Connections First says that even now, in the 21st century, by the age of 12, the average indigenous youngster has made meaningful heart to heart reciprocal connections with over 400 other species. When that happens, you know yourself to be part of a mesh, a web. Our culture tells us that we are isolated individuals, and we're not even connected to each other, and it is wholly wrong. We could dive deep into the reasons why, but if you're listening to this podcast, my sense is that you have a heartfelt sense of connectivity to other people and to the web of life. And we don't need to spend a lot of time on engaging your brain and agreeing with this. So we are integral nodes in the web of life. This is our birthright. If we take that a step further, then we can engage in a thought experiment which says, what if the Web of Life knows exactly what it's doing? What if, as James Lovelock suggested, the whole of the carbon pulse was stored way back in the Carboniferous - all those trees that fell and fell and fell and were crushed at huge pressure under layers of rock, and became coal.
Manda: And all of the plankton, all of the millions upon millions upon millions of tiny bodies of zooplankton and phytoplankton that fell to the bottom of the sea and made layer upon layer upon layer, and were also crushed under pressure and became oil and gas. What if all of that ancient sunlight was stored in order that we release it and make things? This is James Lovelock's proposal. I am not pretending to have crafted that anew, but it is an interesting concept, and I listen to it and let it chime, at least partly inside me, because when I connect to the Web of Life, insofar as I can, however tenuously, it doesn't feel to me like a wide, big spread agency on the verge of panic. And I wonder why no panic when it seems to me that we're on the edge of tipping points that cause large parts of me to panic quite often. So either the wider consciousness of the web has no idea what's going on - n which case, frankly, I think we are well and truly gone - or the wider consciousness of the web knows exactly what's happening: it just needs each of us to wake up and engage and play our part.
Manda: And there is still time to emerge into a new system. Homeostasis is a thing in individual organisms and in ecosystems. Once we breach the boundaries and head into tipping points to a new stable place, then it's much, much harder to get back to the old one. This is the point of Daniel Schwarzenegger's third attractor, that when you spin a ball in a bowl and there's two dips, one on either side, there is a tendency for it to fall into one or other dip, and once it's in, it's really hard to get it out again. And his two dips are fascism or chaos. And what he wants is that we create a third attractor of something that is neither of those things, and which has a tendency to draw spinning ball that is reality towards it.
Manda: So what's our third attractor and how do we get there? Mine, which I have shared fairly often and I am sure you can say in your sleep by now, is a future that we would be proud to have left behind. It's a future where we can go seven generations down the line, look in the eyes of a young person there and ask, are you proud of us? And have them say yes. It's where we can look at the lives that they could lead in seven generations time and see people who wake up in the morning full of a sense of being and belonging, confident that their lives are being lived with meaning, with full connection to the whole of the web of life, such that they can take their part within the web being what only they can be, and being it to the best of their ability. This feels to me the epitome of human existence.
Manda: I strongly suspect that when we get there, there will be a new highlight to aim for. But just for now, that 8 billion of us having lives of meaning and purpose feels like a pretty good aiming point. The problem is, we don't have the structure that gets us there, and we don't have the structure because we don't yet have 8 billion people whose attention is focussed on making that shift. What we have are you who listen to the podcast. So on the basis that tipping points are a thing, and we don't generally know when we've reached them, and we only see them in the rear view mirror… I have recently read revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, which wasn't the best of books. But, you know, it taught me that tipping points are seen in the rear view mirror and that there are institutions in the states that assiduously try to avoid reaching the tipping points where people who are not straight white men start to feel comfortable, and if they can see them coming and can sidestep them while appearing to be going out of their way to be offering inclusion to anyone who isn't a straight white man, then how can we use that understanding of tipping points to help us move towards a world where everybody is not just ready to embrace change, but is actively running towards it? The evidence that Gladwell proposes is around 30%, somewhere between 25 and 30%. So a quarter to a third of any given community or group of people or a college or school or neighbourhood.
Manda: That's the number beyond which change begins to happen really fast, which is a lot higher than the numbers that we used to talk about in the old XR days, which were much closer to single figure percentages. And they were taken from shifts in demographics in favour of gay marriage or women being allowed to vote or not, straight white men being allowed to vote or any of those things. And the problem with that, as we've said on the podcast before, is that increasing the scope of the franchise is a very, very different proposition than suggesting we end the franchise altogether and start with something new. We're going to need a much higher percentage of the population for that. So there are holding actions that I think everybody can be taking at the moment. It's late in the summer, there is no water, but even now, planting things to eat, if you have any access to any ground at all is going to be a good thing. We are going to have food shortages. I'm really not advocating that everybody starts stockpiling beans or anything of that order. I don't think that works, but I also think waiting for the government to catch up and do something useful is pretty much a dead end. Depending on where you live, you might have a really switched on government that really gets it and is being really proactive. But here in the UK, not so much, nor in the North America, nor in most of Europe as far as I can tell.
Manda: So do the basic things, grow food, insulate your house, work out how you can get water if the water goes down. Because even if we nationalise the water companies in the UK, which I sincerely hope is going to happen, or at least bring them into community ownership, our existing water system consumes a lot of power to pump the water around and to clean it in the many, many cycles through the human body that it undergoes as we drink it and pee it out, and they clean it and then we drink it again. Water. We're going to talk about water in a minute. So if you can find ways to store water, that would be good. If you can do anything to help anybody near you with the land to help to regenerate the land, you get sequestration of carbon dioxide, you get increased uptake of water, you get a massive increase in biodiversity, and the food that is grown on that land has demonstrably much better nutrient value than the stuff that is grown in the industrial agriculture system. We have said that often enough, too. So all of these is staringly obvious. None of it is new to this podcast. We could add for completeness, build communities of place, of purpose and of passion. Insofar as you are able, I am taking it as read that anybody listening to this podcast knows now that the old world is gone, that trying to build the things that we believed in, even this time last year is probably futile.
Manda: I do spend quite a lot of time asking everything that I understand to hold answers, whether continuing with a podcast is useful, whether continuing to write a book is useful at the moment. Both seem to be partly because they are enabling communities of place, of purpose and of passion. And potentially, if I can get the book finished and get it right, then it may offer visions of a way forward that lands with enough people to head us towards the tipping points that we're looking for. So that's the holding actions, and it's the beginnings of the systemic change. What we need is the shifting consciousness to build beneath these, to sustain it. And also, I would say, to create the energetic space where change can happen. And this is the point where we step completely out of head-mind and much more into heart-mind and all of the things that we really begin to connect with when we let go of the indoctrination, the domestication of our culture, and begin at least to try to understand what it might be like to have meaningful, heart-based relationships with over 400 other species. When we open ourselves to whatever the Web is and to whatever it may have to offer. So with this in mind, I want to tell you something that happened about two weeks ago.
Manda: I was driving back from dog training. Puppy training. I think we'd been doing Nosework, but it might have been Hoopers. It was fun anyway, and probably one of the things that will be gone shortly in the new system, or at least the collapse of the old system. We are enjoying it while it lasts. And I was on a notpParticularly interesting stretch of road I had that…I don't know how to put this. It's not even an audible whine, which sometimes happens. I sometimes get very high tinnitus, and it means that the grandmothers t-the particular guides that I work with really want me to pay attention to whatever is in my immediate vicinity - this wasn't that. This was a felt sense of something very similar to that. If we were working in the psychic worlds of the clairs, it was a clairaudient signal, and it was absolutely saying, 'Look now at what's in front of you'. And what was in front of me was a truck pulling two trailer loads of trees, essentially newly felled trees, whole trunks, no branches, piled up a dozen each on two trailers being towed along the road. And it took me a while to settle enough to accept that This was what's in front of me and I was being told to pay attention to what's in front of me, and I've been doing this work long enough that I will do that. We can have conversations about sovereignty later if you want, but I am pretty much of the belief that when I choose to open myself to the Web of Life and ask, 'What do you want of me?' Then after that, it's up to me to do what is asked of me.
Manda: And these ideas that we all have to be completely self led are not my ideas. Let's leave it at that. I just recently had a conversation with somebody about sovereignty that went around in circles. We were not really understanding each other. Let's let that one go. Let's assume that you understand that a connected life means there's a degree of reciprocal give and give. I offer, and I'm offered in my turn. And so the signal is there. Pay attention to what's in front of you. And what's in front of me is wood that was recently living trees and following various other experiences that we won't go into because it gets a little bit arcane quite quickly. What I became very, very aware of was the spirits of those trees still in attendance, if you like. And so then the question was, 'What do you want me to do? I can't unmake the slaughter of the trees. I can't put them back in the ground and turn them into trees again.' And what came was that I needed to honour the spirits of the trees. I needed to honour the trees for having been trees and for now, being dead trees. Which sounds staringly obvious now that I'm sitting in front of a microphone and saying it.
Manda: But it felt fairly radical at the time. And in the couple of weeks since, I have been putting a lot of my attention into honouring everything because when I asked about it to guides and spirits, that was the lesson that we work within accidental Gods any of you who are members, we have the three pillars of the heart-mind: Gratitude, Compassion, and Joyful Curiosity - the fires within our heart space. For me, Gratitude and Compassion are fires and Joyful Curiosity is more like sheet lightning. But you know, whatever. These are things that we keep going, that we keep offering. Thanks for the rain, the chickens, the trees, the sky, the red kite, whatever. We offer compassion insofar as we are able to everything in the moment and we hold a sense of joyful curiosity that says, 'Wow, that's amazing. I wonder what happens next? 'And that, in its turn, frees up our head mind from the burden of thinking that it has to know what's going to happen next. This is core to the practice that I live and that we share with others. Honouring everything feels like a new step. And it's it's not huge, but it is significant. And I'm still working with it. But when I sat down and said, 'What do you want me to talk about in the podcast?' This was what came to the surface. So here we are exploring in real time something that I am only just getting my own head around.
Manda: What does it feel like to honour everything, even the things that I perceive to be dead? Like the trees. This layered on top of something that had happened about a month before, also at dog training. There must be something that opens me up when I go to do basically trauma-informed, let's play with the dog-style training. GOod dog behaviour these days is always trauma informed. That's a whole other podcast. I think if anyone's interested in that whole other podcast, let me know. So I was sitting in dog training. Lou and I mainly go together. Lou was doing something with the puppy. I was deliberately holding my attention elsewhere than the puppy because otherwise she has a tendency also to divide her attention. And I was looking at a bunch of bits of plastic. Basically other kit in the barn and parts of me were becoming extremely judgemental about the amount of plastic, and one of my guides stepped right up in front of me and said, 'You don't need to judge.' The word honouring didn't come into it at that point. But 'Look at these things. Each of these has a spirit too'. And so I was beginning to explore how to perceive the connections to the web of things that I had previously considered to be inanimate. And then the trees were added, and the adding of the trees that had recently been alive has brought everything else into much sharper focus, much easier for me to perceive them.
Manda: And this is not a seeing thing. I think often when we do the shamanic journeys and we talk about them afterwards, people think that we're having essentially a video running behind our eyelids, and that's not the case, people. Or at least it's not the case with me. I am having as much as anything, a felt sense of stuff that many decades of practice have let me put into visual metaphors or audio metaphors or scenting things or whatever. Multisensory. It's not like a video. It's much more like a dream where you encounter somebody and you know that it's a friend from childhood, in the dream that you may never have met in actual waking life, but in the dream, they're a friend from childhood and you have no idea what they look like. Really, the number of times you could actually draw a picture of somebody that you met in a dream is very limited, and it's only if you actually need to be able to see the shape of their face for some really important metaphorical reason. Most of the time you just know who they are. It's that level of knowing. So at that level of knowing, I am considerably more aware of the structure and the scope and the scale of the web than I have been before. And this is my job. This is what I do to give myself a sense of meaning and purpose. This is my being and belonging is being connected to the web, asking, 'What do you want of me' and endeavouring to answer the response in real time? So this is a whole new layer of that, and I'm not wholly sure why I need to tell this to many thousands of strangers in parts of the world that I know nothing about.
Manda: We have Japan on the list recently. I don't think we've featured in Japan before at all, but there we go. And Kenya. And I'm very grateful to all of you out there who are listening for whatever reason. But this feels like the conversation we would normally have with the Elder Dreamers who've been working with me for the last 20 years. So I'm trusting that it's going to land with somebody out there and that it's important. And if I were to put it into context, I would say we're on a path. And the path is that the old path is crumbling under our feet, and we are having to build the new path as we go. And the new path arises by shifting out of our head,-mind, and into our heart-mind and our heart-minds are connected to the Web of Life. For me, as I said, the three pillars of our heart-mind are continually giving thanks for everything. I had a killer migraine the other day, the kind where, no, you don't need the details. It was a bad migraine. And because I've been doing this long enough that I occasionally remember to do the things that I try to teach other people to do.
Manda: I was offering gratitude to everything that I care about and that I know about, and that I work with, even while parts of me were thinking, 'Just shoot me now, it's going to be so much better.' So gratitude for the things that are hard, as well as gratitude for things that are good. Compassion in the places and at the times and for the people and the things and the ideas for which we feel least compassion. And yes, it's not easy. Joyful curiosity to give us that sense of awe and wonder at the absolute majesty of the world, and now a sense of honouring everything, honouring the dustbin, as I take it down the lane, honouring the tarmac on the road as I'm driving, honouring the microphone and the screen and the connection to you, whoever you are, wherever you are, whom I have almost certainly never met, honouring all of that. And somewhere in this, I think I hope, is a broadening of our sense of what we are and what we're here for and what we can do, or more importantly, who we can be. And I am wondering and have been wondering for the last few days whether this is a useful step on the way to the inner shifts that we need to make, to that sense of bringing all parts of ourselves on board with the project of being human and of being connected to the web of life.
Manda: This is the part of our inner Venn diagram where spirituality and therapy cross over, which is a fairly niche place. And yet, if we are going to come into the fullness of who we can be as human beings, we have to do the inner work. And the inner work means having the courage to engage with the parts of ourselves of which we are least proud, that nonetheless have astonishing creativity and strength and speed of action, and the capacity to completely overwhelm the rest of our system whenever they feel triggered. And the question then is always, what happens if that part doesn't feel the need to be triggered? What happens if it stops defending the position that it's been defending? Probably for all of our lives, and possibly a little longer, and brings all of its speed and power and creativity in service to our system, which is in turn in service to life. And this, again, is something that we've explored before, but not in the context of honouring. What does it feel like to honour all parts of ourselves? I don't fully know the answer to that yet because I'm still exploring it. But if I can honour the tap and the bin and the tarmac and the microphone, as well as the red kite and the hill and the trees, can I also honour all the parts of myself that are most complex, and from which the rest of me most often shies away, in order to help those parts to integrate into the wholeness of my system, in order that I bring more of me in service to life.
Manda: This is broadly what we explored back at the Inner Warrior Gathering online back at the June summer solstice, and I was really impressed with the courage of the people who came and the willingness, really to engage with what an inner warrior is about having the courage to step into the places where we can engage with these parts of ourselves with full compassion and gratitude and joyful curiosity. But I didn't have the honouring in my own system then. I hadn't really unpacked it. I hadn't been introduced to it in the way that I was when we were following the trees. So if we do the Inner Warrior Gathering next year, then I will have a new layer to add into it. But that's a long way away. And in the meantime, it seems to me that we could all be using this.
Manda: What would the world feel like if every single person who listens to this podcast were able to bring all of themselves in service to life? I think it would be amazing. I think we would be heading near tipping points. Not necessarily because you number we number one, third or even a quarter of the population of the planet. Quite clearly we don't. But I think energetic shifts are exponential. Anybody who sat in circle knows that one person who is genuinely grounded in a circle of however, many people can ground the whole circle. Somebody who's really spinning off can pull a lot of a circle away. If there is nobody well grounded in the circle, but if there is somebody well grounded in the circle, it doesn't really matter how much or how hard somebody else is kicking off, the circle will remain grounded. This does not entirely follow the tipping points concept of a quarter to a third being the number that you need to really make change in a system. But we are never going to get a quarter to a third of the whole world's population behind anything. Most of the people in the world are still struggling to survive. The ones at the top are busy, struggling to try and suck in more value. Those of us who have, at the moment, the privilege of having time to listen to a podcast, of having the space in our lives to make a podcast who are still able to eat and have shelter…then what happens if we give all of ourselves in service to life? How much could that change the energy of the world around us?
Manda: I have no idea the answer to this, but I think it's an experiment that would be very interesting for us to attempt. And given that we only ever see tipping points in the rear view mirror, we will not know we're succeeding until after the event. So there's not a lot of metrics that we can use to see how we're doing.
Manda: That said, I don't know about you, but I am seeing a lot of shifts in narrative. The wildfires and the whole of the summer, and the very obvious naked corruption of the system are allowing a lot of people to acknowledge that the current system is not fit for purpose, which is not the same as beginning to honour every part of life and beginning to do the inner work. But it opens doors to the conversations. And definitely this is not a conversation that we could have with people who are expecting to be exploring how to grow more food, how to do regenerative farming, how to create a different governance system, how to bring water companies into a sane form of community ownership. But in every single one of those conversations, there will be people who would be open to this conversation. And simply by being in the space where you are grounded and heart open, where the three pillars are alight and alive, I think there's a sense by which we become an energetic signal. Maybe I'm not really convinced that the word beacon is the right word, but it's the one that's coming to the top of my head. So let's say an energetic beacon that allows other people to join us or for us to join them. And then we begin to get the exponential impact. So this is not entirely the podcast that I thought I was going to make, but it is the one that feels right.
Manda: So if you've enjoyed it, please let me know. If you write to my email, you will get an out of office that says, I'm writing the book. I'm probably not going to read your email. And there are days when that's true. There are days when I don't even switch my email on because I absolutely have got to get some of this book written. However, I do try to read most of the emails even if I don't respond to them. So feel free to write.
Manda: And before we go, there's a poem that I want to read to you. It's on Facebook from John Roedell. Is that how we say ROEDEL? And he's a really lovely poet, and it says,
Manda: "I used to get so bored with being alive.Then one day I started to pretend that I was an angel who was sent to earth on a secret mission to absorb as much beauty as I could before being called back home. Then a couple of days later, I started to pretend that everyone else was on the exact same mission. Then soon after, I stopped pretending. Now I see halos everywhere."
Manda: So that's it for this week. Thanks to Caro C for the music and the production, to Lou for the video, Anne Thomas for the transcript. Faith Tilleray for being amazing. And to all of you for listening. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.